The Silk Roads — Peter Frankopan

Frankopan's reorientation of world history takes Central Asia — the pivot point between East and West — as its subject rather than its backdrop. The Silk Roads are not just trade routes but the connective tissue through which religion, disease, money, and ideas moved across Eurasia for two millennia. In doing so, he argues that the standard Western-centred narrative has been obscuring where the real action was.